Editorial

Monday, 14 September 2009 00:29

Backgammon as a game of skill with an element of chance has been around for many hundreds of years. It has been used both as a game purely for entertainment and also as a means of gambling throughout that time, depending upon where you happened to be in the world.

There have also been smaller, locally organised backgammon competitions but until 2006 it had never before achieved the status of an international tournament game. It was also a rather late addition to an already expanding portfolio of online casino games, probably due to its reputation as less of a gambling medium and more an intellectual game. That, of course has completely changed now, but has backgammon really only ever been a family oriented game, or has it a more interesting history that many people are not aware of?

In actual fact, in Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Cyprus, backgammon has for centuries been a highly popular form of gambling. Players can to this day still be found in bars and cafes as well as sitting in parks and other places where the public can gather playing a highly charged and often almost violent form of the game. There, it is played on a stout wooden board with wooden markers which are forcefully slammed around the board at an incredibly fast pace following each roll of the dice. To anyone who ever considered backgammon as a quiet, composed family game, the sight of animated Greeks playing backgammon for money is a truly incredible sight. The games themselves are difficult to keep up with, being played so fast.

For the rest of the more sedate players of this fascinating game, its elevation to international status in 2006 came with the creation of the World Series of Backgammon, or WSOB, which is the backgammon equivalent of poker's WSOP. In that year, the game's first international tournament was held in Las Vegas, providing the foil for its elevation into the online casino platform as a game of gambling that the whole world could enjoy.

The 2006 WSOB season 1, the first of its kind and amalgamated the Riviera Cup and the Nations Cup to become a single world event. Ireland's Sean Casey won the Riviera Cup that year, while in the Nations Cup, USA beat Denmark. Subsequent events include season II, which was held in 2008 and encapsulated the London UK Masters and the Nordic Open with the final being held in Cannes, France. Frenchman Frederic Andrieu was the winner of the Gold Cube taking a champion's cheque for €100.000. The second season saw more than half a million euros won in prize money. The third season for 2009 will be held simultaneously in London, Prague and Cannes with the championship prize money totalling €320,000.

By the time the first WSOB had started however, backgammon had already been played as an online game purely for fun since the mid 1990s. However, it wasn't until 2005 that the first play for cash version of the game appeared online. In this guise, players were able to play against each other rather than against the house, as with most other online casino games. This gave backgammon the distinction of being a game that could be highly profitable for players who had honed their skills in a similar way that poker can pay handsomely for skilled players. 

This has allowed online backgammon to evolve in much the same way as online poker has evolved. There are many similarities between the two with backgammon lobbies set out with tables that are organised according to the stake, the speed and scoring while the casinos that host them take their rake from the game's stakes in order to make their profits.

This system is attracting ever more players to the game as the element of skill means that the better players get at the game, the more chance they have to win big, in a similar manner to poker. With ever more tournaments being organised and ever growing prize pots, backgammon's popularity as a serious gambler's game will only increase as it spreads to more casino sites online. This is good news for lovers of the game, as it provides yet another level of their favourite game to play on with the added bonus of a chance at making some serious cash to those that get to the top of their game.

Backgammon may still be a family game and one enjoyed by both sedate intellectuals as a game of skill and crazed Mediterranean gamblers as a means of releasing the day's stresses with the chance of taking your opponent's money. Its elevation to the online platform is just another step forward on its own evolution as a serious contender for the popularity of online poker combined with the allure of its nature as a game for all skill levels.